Lit reviewing "developer experience" as a construct and earliest thing I found in initial search is from Fagerholm and Münch(2012):
F. Fagerholm and J. Münch, "Developer experience: Concept and definition," 2012 International Conference on Software and System Process (ICSSP), Zurich, Switzerland, 2012, pp. 73-77, doi: 10.1109/ICSSP.2012.6225984.
It doesn't reference any existing literature on developer experience. Google ngram also shows a HUGE spike in "developer experience" mentions in 2013.
For those who have been in the software development & engineering space for awhile: Does this feel temporally accurate? Do you remember talking about "developer experience" way ahead of 2012? I'm wondering if industry informed research focus with this paper, or if the paper and operationalization of the term informed industry.
(My husband has been looking over my shoulder all morning calling me a nerd loser for doing a "developer experience" lit review and I'm like whatever this feeds my soul sucka).
@gvwilson LOLOLOLOL. I too have admittedly never understood what I will operationalize as "indentation passion", or maybe "beliefs about indentation" 😆 . I'm also a "child of the late 2010's" in terms of learning to code, which I really think is a contributing factor there!
@KFosterMarks I think a certain kind of programmer argues passionately over indentation or variable naming for the same reason that their spiritual cousins argue passionately over obscure bands or scriptural passages: they can't control any of the big things in their lives, so they channel all that energy into trivia. Or maybe I'm just projecting…
@KFosterMarks I remember a Sun Microsystems rep talking about "programmer comfort" in the late 1980s (more specifically, as something they had that IBM and SGI didn't). I also remember the phrase "engineering ergonomics" from about the same time, but can't recall context. The idea was definitely used by Unix fans as a stick to beat up Windows in that period even if the name varied.
@gvwilson Oh, interesting! It makes sense that at that moment in time, the PHYSICAL experience of doing programming and software work would have been a focus. Thanks for sharing this!
@KFosterMarks if I recall correctly, the sales droid was talking about both ease of programming and what the support from the company and the (at the time, very active) developer community felt like (though I doubt the word "community" was used).
@gvwilson@KFosterMarks the use of "ergonomics" to cover everything from chairs to core psychological needs haunts me as a piece of business jargon monoxide 😭
Psychophysical and -social needs influencing individual performance can be roughly divided into motivator and hygiene factors [23]. Motivator factors are related to the work itself and can increase performance, while hygiene factors are unrelated to the work
itself and can result in dissatisfaction if they are missing (e.g. salary).
I did a double-take at "hygiene factors", and then was like "salary is a hygiene factor"?
What's that citation? "motivator and hygiene" is a bizarre division but I suppose if you're giving yourself the task of reinventing human motivational theory first principles from the outside in based on of ALL things, highly constrained interaction design, you're gonna start to use some odd language.
Absurd to say the relationship is unidirectional to dissat; absurd to say it tells us nothing re: how performance expectations.
@KFosterMarks@grimalkina Oh! Motivation-Hygiene theory! It’s an old school 2-factor model of workplace satisfaction in Organizational Psych where motivation factors are things that boost satisfaction, like the visibility and value of work, and hygiene factors are things that lower it, like low salary. I can’t remember why they’re called hygiene factors though - tis a strange term in todays lens for sure. It’s largely abandoned because it thinks of satisfaction and dissatisfaction as being
@KFosterMarks@grimalkina discrete factors, rather than being on a continuum. I believe the model in favor in org psych is now the JCM - I can’t remember what it stands for off the top of my head (Hackman and Oldman). I actually have an issue with both models because they largely ignore cognitive-behavioral and sociocultural factors, but they actually both have some good bits taken that are consistent with expectancy value and acceptance based behavior theories.
@KFosterMarks@grimalkina I did a lit review that dissected the history of employee and developer satisfaction models last year that I should probably share publicly at some point 😅
"If you have to do any writing in your job, this chapter is for you. Just as in science writing, anxiety is a big part of the problem and humanity and clear thinking are a big part of the solution."
@trochee@gvwilson@KFosterMarks Also poignant in a way that I did not realize back when I first read this book, not yet doing research on the isolation of engineering teams, he wrote: "Go to the engineer who conceived the new system," I said, "or to the designer who designed it, or to the technician who assembled it, and get them to tell you in their own words how the idea came to them, or how they put it together, or how it will be used by real people in the real world."
(I've been reading STEERSWOMAN, a SFF story about (among others) a guild of, uh, scientific wandering bards whose lives are dedicated to traveling around the world asking and answering questions, and this advice reminds me of that guild)
@grimalkina@trochee@gvwilson@KFosterMarks Having been deep in devtools in 2012-2013, talk of ”developer experience” emerging around then makes sense, I can see it meeting a need. Node.js revolution meant you could turn front-end devs into backend devs. GitHub was propagating, lowering the barrier to production of OSS software.
If as a VC you REALLY want software eating the world, you also need devs eager to cook that world
Oooh love this insight! I was secretly hoping you'd pop in here with some context and history at some point! 😍
I went through my bootcamp in 2016, when AngularJS was still just Angular, and React was a new and exciting thing that people were highly suspicious of, and I feel like certain things (like full stack development, popularity of GitHub, SPAs, etc.) were very new, but I my perception of them was that "this is how software development has always been done."
@anthrocypher@trochee@gvwilson@KFosterMarks That makes sense yet pitching a dev focused startup in 2017 is a personal lived experience of absolute lack of caring about developer experience that makes me think not a lot of people got there
“Developer experience” was not a term I’d see used in industry till much later (~2020), but most “We <3 devs!” initiatives ~2017 were things like: beer, swag, buying licenses to the tools folks were clamoring for. Very “short-term selfish”.
Willing to bet whatever you were building was vastly more sophisticated and “long-term selfish”. Hope to hear more sometime.
@grimalkina@trochee@gvwilson@KFosterMarks Just to finish out the storytelling: There was a brief moment 2020-2022 where I saw "developer experience" enter industry vocabulary, I was really excited we might finally be onto something, and then 2023 hit and we started laying everybody off.
So if you're thinking we never quite got there, Cat, I would agree.
@KFosterMarks From 2009 to 2013, I was a teacher (and eventually a Program Manager) at a university for Bachelor's degrees in Web Design & Development, and Mobile Development.
At the time I left, we were already using the phrases "student experience" and "learner experience" pretty heavily. As the degrees were entirely focused on producing professional developers, they were synonyms for DX. We spent tons of time doing DX like trying to automate annoying tasks, automate & share IDE config, etc.
@KFosterMarks PEOPLEWARE was written in 1987 and I don’t know if it uses the exact term but it’s definitely about how the developer experience impacts outcomes.
@KFosterMarks I would have said that people in the HTTP API space were applying user experience of developers as "developer experience" to describe API design as early as 2010. A quick Twitter search appears to support that?
From 1990’s people like @mralancooper & Grady Booch - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grady_Booch have been designing & building tools, writing books to address the human developer eXperience (DX). AFAIA the term did not become popular until Software as a Service (SaaS) with a focus on User eXperience became a business interest. Then certain businesses realized their SaaS products & APIs needed developer adoption for success and DX became a base SaaS business consideration - https://thenewkingmakers.com
@KFosterMarks I'm going back through two and a half decades of my blog and finding little, but it sure feels like the concept, if not the term, came up in discussions about development on the NeXT platform in the '90s. Like that environment was popular among developers for smaller markets, where the developer experience in turning out software quickly override the need to put a product in every living room.
@KFosterMarks
Hmmm, I can’t remember when that specific term entered my world. Certainly that idea by whatever name shows up very clearly in the design and marketing of, for example, Ruby on Rails in the mid-00s, the IDEs of the mid 90s (CodeWarrior, Think C), Turbo Pascal, Beagle Brothers, Smalltalk…
Ooooh Paul can you tell me more? Tbh, I'm swimming in investigatory paths to follow up on in through the many responses to my original question, and won't have time to deep dive on each one - how did Grace Hopper talk about FLOW-MATIC?
@KFosterMarks that sounds like the right ballpark to me. I vaguely remember a period where I would immediately understand what was meant by “UX”, and then had to keep looking up “DX”.
(I’m not sure whether DX has improved since I was working on a 486DX2)
omg @grimalkina just used Google Scholar to see who has been citing what I THINK might be this seminal work AND YOU ARE THE MOST RECENT 😂 I swear I found this independent of your Psychological Affordances paper, and I am truly, truly delighted at this lovely intersection this morning 😍
@KFosterMarks lmao validation I did a good lit review though 😎 ! I chose those cites really carefully, this wasn't a "history of psych in programming" lit review but I think Blackwell - Curtis - Fagerholm tells a really interesting story as an unintentional anthology 💞
@grimalkina Okay well I'm putting together an annotated bib on Developer Experience (when I woke up this morning, this project had not yet been borne...) so I'm definitely consulting you for feedback once I put my initial list of citations together...
@grimalkina@KFosterMarks can I ask for a link so that I may add this to My Pile Of Papers To Read?
(I recently stumbled into the whole space of „psychology and design“ and information architecture and am having that orientational hoover-up-everything phase.)
@KFosterMarks not totally familiar across all subfields here because they're so disjointed -- but imho there was a rise in "we gotta bring more human behavior knowledge into software teams" ~2012. Parallels a rising investment in UX same time: "User experience is a concept that captures how persons feel about products, systems and services. It evolved from disciplines such as interaction design and usability to a much richer scope that includes feelings, motivations, and satisfaction"
@grimalkina Thanks for this input, Cat! Something I learned from this Fagerholm and Münch paper was about "developer experience" origins in UX - totally made sense!
Okay from "nerd loser" to another - how fun is it to read seminal work!? I'm just having so much fun this morning 😆
@KFosterMarks anecdotally, same time, ~2012-2013, MOOCs started to get big in education and psychology researchers such as myself were told "you could MAYBE do UX but nothing else in tech??? They seem to be asking a lot about experience" and "people analytics" approaches in HR were rising. Decades old academic ideas found a certain new life in a wave of management best practices and I think software has just been even a decade behind on this. This is armchair speculation/my personal memories :)
@KFosterMarks Behavioral econ theory was really raging inside of tech cos at the time too -- many of us who had done empirical research from many different fields got advice/pushback that everything we did had to be like "nudge theory". There was a ton of hype about doing massive inference about human behavior and the scalability of interventions, but very few observational causal inference methods had broken through at that time in data work imho.
@grimalkina Very interesting! It's been on my to-do list to do a quick lit review on "nudge theory", having heard you and @CSLee discuss at various times...
@KFosterMarks@CSLee It is an idea that was taken up FAR outside of the bounds of its original evidence and something that I consider a strong warning example on the failure to apply systemic structural thinking to behavioral sci (plus, the way society worships anything from an economist and nothing from those of us who actually work on social topics). imho it is really unfortunate that it became the single "behavioral intervention" idea businesses grabbed onto and accepted.
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